Here's an alternative: Google throws a credit card form in front of Google Reader and people can pay for the service.
Why not just stop the development on it and let the service to continue?
I never had any problems with Google Reader, nor do I want a particular feature to be added to it. It's fine as it is.
It's fine, as long as it crawls every feed, merges the contents, archives them, serves up the bandwidth, allows people to write custom front-ends that prohibit Google from even showing you any extra data like say an ad?
So, I agree, after all those bad decisions it would have been very difficult to make Google Reader a relevant revenue source. However, long-term support of such a core service is part of Google's reputation, it was even so important to the users Google could at least have been able to cover the costs.